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Spinnie Reunited: Papaya Milk and Beef Noodle

1. Welcome back to another installment of the Leroy Records ;) following http://sinospenceriantales.blogspot.com
2. This time, Leroy has landed in Taiwan to meet his girl Winnie in Taipei...
3. so it begins!
4. Day 1:
5. Leave my house at 5am, hop a Lyft to Beacon Hill Station to grab one of the morning's first light rail trains. Arrive at the airport, check my bag without incident, and hop on the plane to San Fran.
6. Sleep all the way there. On arrival, our docking with the gate is delayed by some computer failure on the last plane at that gate. As the airport apparently has no failure tolerance protocols for gate allocation, we wait an astonishing hour fifteen before we can deplane. I catch up on Instagram, for once. Fortunately, we did land a little early so my meeting with Aunt Joan is not too delayed. Joan picks me up off the curb and we speed off towards a swanky cafe. Of course, this being the Bay Area, there is a 40 minute wait there, so we keep walking and end up at a bakery, where we have some delicious pastries. We talk about my job, investing--I still have no understanding of how individuals can make money investing when there is a whole fleet of people with specialized knowlege bases, tools and connections out there taking all the best opportunities. Joan postulates that even these hardened experts are driven by emotional responses to market fluctuations, which seems more true than I would possibly expect from first principles.
7. We make it back to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Hug Joan goodbye and head to gate 98. Meet a dude at security who runs a big home security business and is attempting to get his daughter into an Ivy League via water polo (pretty successfully, it would seem)
8. I get to my gate with plenty of time to Skype Grace! We have a very fun catching up session. Grace had a good time selling at the Fairhaven Steampunk Festival. It appears she is quite excited to blow this popsicle stand and take off for Cambridge. Hopefully we'll be able to meet up before then--she mentions maybe a big family dinner.
9. The flight is delayed by a laggard in the gate once again! I make the quality decision to take a couple of laps around the terminal. I make a couple walking laps, sit down and chow a sandwich, start jogging... soon I master the skill of flipping my baseball cap up onto my head as I run along the moving walkway, and register some ragged cheers from the other walkway ;) Boy, traveling with a hat to goof around with is a good tradition.
10. I get back to the gate and surprise myself by energetically going up and down the stairs down to the gate. I keep it up for a good 10 or 15 minutes. Then I switch to stretching, and even get in a few tricep dips and push ups before we have to board.
11. After all the exercise, I easily sleep on the plane for a good 4 hours. I wake up, spend some quality drowsy time looking at other people watching movies and trying to guess what was going on without context or sound. I dig into a delicious spiced Hunan chicken meal--I was quite impressed by the quality. 
12. I do a couple of hours of work to summarize what I have left to do after the hack week for my boss, then watch a crazy Japanese detective movie, "Last Shot in the Bar" which is quite entertaining! I find it after watching a bunch of bizarre trailers.
13. Go back to sleep for a couple of hours, then watch an Indian romance called "Meri Pyaari Bindu", or "My Sweet Bindu". The movie is very good, beautifully filmed, although I only get about halfway before we touch down.
14. The intriguing, slightly spice-laden smell of Asia hits me, unintuitively, even as I step off the plane. To immigration I roll, and pass through (after being stopped because I accidentally left off part of Winnie's address on the arrival form). Pick up my bag, walk through the green line at Customs...
15. And am greeted by a flying Winnie! Yaaay! W greets me with a giant hug.
16. Her dad Jim is present as well and the three of us head out through the airport. We stop at a little 7-11 and grab some drinks--at Jim's recommendation I have a papaya milk. It is delicious, with a rich papaya flavor and something of a yogurty tang. 
17. Then to the highway! Winnie and I hang out in the backseat of her dad's Cadillac as we cruise down the elevated expressway, looking out over the sea of medium-rises that stretch upwards like little branches at the top of the urban canopy, all around us. 
18. We make it to Winnie's place, which is on this neat narrow little road between two medium-rise apartment buildings. Balconies look down on us from both sides. We hustle to drop off our stuff, passing through three locked doors--a metal one on the street, a metal one at the balcony entrance, and a wood door inside that--to reach the Wang family balcony. There, the doors to the apartment are unlocked.
19. We head back down and walk over to a beef noodle shop, passing by little auto and AC repair shops and fleets of little scooter mopeds parked along the sidewalk. At the beef noodle shop, Winnie tells me about the writing on the menu--the dishes are named with "How It's Made: + ingredients / cooking techniques" (in Chinese characters, of course--Taiwan speaks a dialect of Mandarin). Meanwhile, Winnie's mom Mei (or Mei Ai for auntie) scrutinizes the side dishes and picks out a few tasty ones for our table.
20. The beef noodle, a hearty stew, is delicious. The beef is extraordinarily tender :D I struggle with eating the noodles, by picking them up with my chopsticks and then dropping just the right amount onto my soup spoon. We chat about my trip and the food. They worry that I am picky, although Winnie has told them otherwise, but their fears are swiftly dismissed. I dig into the side dishes, some tasty seaweed with lots of garlic, some bok choi, some pickles--all very tasty.
21. Head back to the apartment with Winnie after her mom and dad took their scooter to the store. We sit in my air-conditioned room--the global air conditioning is broken so everyone sticks to their rooms with the doors closed--and catch up. Gosh, it's so nice to be in close proximity to Winnie again! :D We catch up on some of the papers she's been reading, on my work, on the plans for the trip... even on a UBI discussion on the Drunken Philosophers chat. We read a UBI article and laugh over the errors of the Finnish government and our friend's misinterpretation of the article :P
22. Finally, I hit the hay around 2am Taiwan time and fall asleep nearly instantly.